Speaker: Sabeer Bhatia - Entrepreneur and Visionary

Topic: 'On the Silicon Valley Bug'

Length of Video: 4 minutes 33 seconds TiECon (TiE Conference) Texas 2006, Austin, TX November 17, 2006

On a nationally televised interview I was asked, "So after you started Hotmail, Our Zoo failed spectacular (sic), it was about 3 (or) 4 years ago, and do you think you are a "one hit wonder"?" I am, like, I don't know...it's too early in my life to say if I am just a "one hit wonder" but even if I am just a "one hit wonder" when I am sixty years old, if I haven't done anything else, if I haven't done one other thing after Hotmail, then you can accuse me of being a "one hit wonder".

But if I have tried ten different things, if one of them makes it, or if none of them make it, at least it won't be for want of trying. I will consider myself to be a happy man at the end of my life if you ask me that question. First of all, you are asking me the wrong question. Then I gave him the example of how 9 out of 10 companies in Silicon Valley failed. My personal own example: I put money in a fund, it was a 20 or 30 million dollar fund, and I used to get letters in 2001 and 2002 that "all of our investments have gone under water, we will be lucky if we make ten cents on the dollar on the investment that you made" and things were looking very grim.

Obviously the person who was running the fund expressed that. Well, fortunately he had made one small investment out of 25 million dollars, one investment of fifty thousand dollars in a company called Google, in its early days. That 25 million dollar fund returned two and a half times the entire fund because of one investment! So here is an example of one company that made it out of 150. It's okay, those are the kind of odds you have to play in order to succeed.

That's the game in Silicon Valley that's played all day long, all the time. So, it's okay to try... but if you don't try you're making a big mistake. My parents both worked in the same company...my mom worked at the same bank for 34 years, she was shocked that after, like, a year at Apple and another couple of years at Firepower, I was quitting both these companies and starting my own. I was bitten by the Silicon Valley "bug". Had I not done that, you know, I would have just been an engineer in some company, you know, getting the regular salary, paying my mortgage, and doing the regular thing.

I am here today building a city, thinking of bigger visions and ideas because I've been able to do...I've taken a bigger risk at some point in time. Had I not done that, I would not have gotten to this stage of doing something so exciting. So, it wasn't taught to me, in fact, the culture was quite contrary but the good thing is that I am not the businessman in the sense that I don't buy things and sell things at a "cost plus", in fact, those are the kinds of businesses I strongly dislike.

I love ideas which have a very huge intellectual component or where you bring in better design principles and you do the right things to make a difference...to make a difference in a meaningful way. That's why something to do with IP creation, that's the kind of thinking that I want to hopefully teach people in India. And alongside (that), it may be more of an idea but if you can teach that and at the same time "fix" the infrastructure (like I mentioned to you) then you have really solved two problems with one "stone".